“I’m assuming you know who took them?” El asked. Ruby’s intel network spanned the length and breadth of the city. If she wanted something - especially information - then, generally, she found it.
“Took me 2 days,” said Ruby. “None of my usual lot had anything to give me. Then Jim Duggan got a tip-off over in Ladbroke Grove. You remember him? He’d got talking to the O’Connell brothers down the Portobello market, and they said they’d been talking to this bloke in the pub the night before. A new face, not a bloke they recognised - and they know everyone out west.”
It’s like Chinese bloody whispers sometimes, El thought. Or like gossip in the playground: he said, and then she said, and so I said…
“And what did he say?” she asked. “This bloke in the pub?”
“By all accounts,” said Ruby, “he was bragging…”
“Three grand!” the bloke had said, five pints in. “Three grand to do over some old lady’s flat! And she wasn’t even in. Easiest money I ever made, I tell you.”
“And did you know who she was, the old lady?” asked Mark O’Connell, thinking of his 95 year old grandmother in Sligo and wondering, idly, who’d be the first of the Swan & Rushes regulars to lay the bastard out on the cobbles when they heard him congratulating himself for doing over a pensioner.
“How should I know?” the bloke had said. “That posh cow didn’t pay me to ask questions, did she? All I had to do was go in, get the package and let myself out again before the old bird came back.”
The package? Mark O’Connell had asked.
Yeah, the bloke had said. And this was where it got a bit peculiar. Because the bloke had sworn - not that the sworn word of a dirty, granny-robbing gobshite meant much to Mark O’Connell, you understand - that the package wasn’t really a package at all. It was a kid’s comic book.
“Two comics,” the bloke had added, correcting himself. “All tied up together in plastic. Fucking weird, mate, I tell you. Must have been worth a bit, mind, because that posh cow, she was desperate to get hold of them…”
The bloke, Mark O’Connell had been delighted to report, had left the pub that night two teeth shorter than he’d gone in, and with a lovely pair of bruises on one side of his face that, with any luck, would stay with him for at least a fortnight.
“And the posh cow was…?” El asked, already knowing the answer.
“The woman from the auction,” Ruby said. “Lady Muck with the pearl necklace.”
Who, she’d quickly discovered, really was a Lady: Lady Rose Winchester, wife of Sir Sebastian, a low-level aristocrat and, until his premature death 3 years earlier, wildly successful and exorbitantly wealthy media entrepreneur. Lady Rose was 40, worth just north of £200 million, and lived alone with her 12 year old daughter, dividing their time between a house in Highgate and an apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
Beyond her daughter, Lady Rose was known to enjoy two things: rock-climbing, and Pop Art. The former she exercised through annual expeditions to Red River Gorge and Yosemite National Park; the latter through an ever-expanding private collection of Lichtensteins, Blakes and Rauschenbergs.
“And old comics?” said El.
“And old comics,” said Ruby.
On the London art scene, at least, Lady Rose had a reputation for ruthlessness that bordered on cruelty - and for getting what she wanted, always, regardless of the cost. She was considered, Ruby had learned, substantially more knowledgeable than the average high-society dilettante; unlike the CEOs’s wives and retired rock stars she would regularly bid against, she could more than hold her own with dealers, curators, appraisers. She was also more fastidious than most about security: her Highgate home, the temperature-controlled basement of which housed the largest of her collections, was protected by electronic gates, CCTV cameras and, rumour had it, an armed guard at the entrance.
“So you want me to get in and get the comics back,” said El.
“No!” said Ruby quickly. “Not yet. It’s too soon. She’s sharp - she’d put two and two together easy and work out who it was that did it. And she knows where I live, remember?”
“What, then?” El asked. She lit another cigarette - reasoning that, if Ruby was going to drag her in to whatever this was, then she could stand to suffer a lungful of smoke in the process.
“Something better than a smash and grab job,” Ruby said. “Something a bit more sophisticated. She was in my house, girl. I want to hit her where it hurts.”
“And where’s that?”
Ruby didn’t answer. El waited, familiar enough with the older woman’s style of back-and-forth to know she wouldn’t be rushed.
Eventually, Ruby spoke.
“What do you know,” she said, “about Keith Haring?”
Chapter 4
Leicestershire
1996
There were streaks in El’s hair - two jagged lines of purple, radiating out from her parting to just below her ears. She was a decade too old for them, at least, and the supermarket dye she’d used to achieve them was so cheap it made her scalp itch, but they fitted. Claire Brandon, whose life she’d be inhabiting for the next few hours, couldn’t afford a decent hairdresser, and was - as the streaks, the ‘ethnic’ wooden jewellery and the dark nail polish all indicated - still clinging to the precipice of her adolescence by her fingertips, in defiance of her chronological age.
She wore black-framed glasses with clear lenses, a loose-fitting skirt made of soft green fabric, a long flowing shirt tied loosely at the midriff and brown hiking boots laced up to the ankle. Now, in the full-body mirror mounted for exactly this purpose in her hallway, she rearranged her features into the right configuration, settling on an expression that said “my PhD is worth more than any money you could offer me,” but also, simultaneously, “without this job, I’m going to struggle to pay my rent this month.”
Claire Brandon - Dr Claire Brandon, as El was sure she’d be likely to remind people at any opportunity - was an early-career academic and specialist in contemporary Anglo-American art. El was especially proud of her thesis, the title of which (Making Inroads: Street Art and Queer Culture in New York and San Francisco, 1977-1990) was inspired by the innumerable monographs and art history journals she’d devoured since Ruby had proposed the con three weeks before. The colon, she thought, was a particularly nice touch.
The books and journals now occupied a dedicated shelf in her reading room, sandwiched between equally dense texts on mineralogy and Southeast Asian trade routes, a testament to the thoroughness of her prep work. El had finished her own modern languages degree in her mid-20s after 6 stop-and-start years of enrolment, but had declined to progress to further study, on the basis that the particular line of work she’d chosen offered more than ample opportunity for ongoing professional and cognitive development, in addition to the more practical skill set it conferred. She’d never regretted the decision - and had, she suspected, acquired a broader and more diverse knowledge base over the years than she’d ever have picked up in a classroom.
Ruby, conversely, was aggrieved by her decision to give up the higher education ghost at what she deemed the first hurdle. She’d left school herself at 14, going immediately to work on the production line of a ball-bearing factory in Bethnal Green, but was an avowed advocate of education in others - regarding the string of letters both her sons had amassed after their names as not only a point of pride, but a clear vindication of the transformative power of maternal nagging.
In the mirror, El added to her eyelids a few brushes of purple shadow - an almost-match for the streaks in her hair - and to her lips a smear of Superdrug strawberry lip gloss. She stepped across to the coat-rack by the door, thought for a moment, then picked from the dozen or so accessories hanging there an oversized canvas bag, beaded and furred and decorated with animal print. Into the bag she slipped a piece of paper, neatly word-processed on both sides and sheathed in a transparent acetate wallet, and her house keys - a three-inch silicone likeness of the head of
Michel Foucault, purchased especially for the occasion, grinning obscenely from the keyring.
And with that, she was ready.
She locked the front door, activated both sets of burglar alarms and walked up the path to the driveway where she kept her car parked, fortifying herself for the two hour drive into London.
Ruby, whose internal compass identified any point beyond St Albans as The North, had initially questioned El’s judgement in buying the house, a 16th century cottage with a thatched roof and three acres of garden. And, indeed, in moving back to Leicestershire at all.
“What you going to do with yourself all the way up there?” she’d asked when El had first shown her the place in the estate agents’ brochure - aghast at the prospect of anyone willingly exchanging the civilised pleasures of the city for the wilds of the East Midlands. “Your life’s here. Your work’s here. When was the last time you even did a job outside the M25?”
El had argued her case with conviction - pointing to the transport links, the proximity to nature, the cleaner air and greater availability of land. Eventually, exasperated, she’d thrown Ruby’s own advice back at her.
“I’m trying not to shit where I eat,” she’d said - and this, at least, Ruby had seemed to understand.
But none of these reasons, valid though all of them were, were the whole of the truth.
The journey south was uneventful, the motorway clear, and she pulled off the M1 into Barnet earlier than she’d anticipated. She parked the car in a side street by the Totteridge and Whetstone station and took the tube the rest of the way to Highgate. Claire Brandon didn’t drive; couldn’t stretch to a car on her salary.
The house was a four storey Victorian red-brick off Hampstead Lane, gated and detached, set apart from the human and vehicular traffic of the main road. There was no guardhouse out front that El could see, but there was room for one; what had once been the front garden was paved and levelled, creating so much open space that El’s own cottage could have fitted comfortably in the gap between the gate and the front door.
She pressed the buzzer by the gatepost, and waited. A minute or so later, a voice rang out over the intercom, buried under layers of static but recognisably young and female.
“Claire Brandon,” said El, slipping into the soft Yorkshire vowels left over from Brandon’s early years in Halifax. “Here to see Rose Winchester.”
Brandon, she’d decided, wouldn’t recognise titles; wouldn’t kowtow to an antiquated class system and its hierarchies. If this came off as arrogant, it could only help her cause.
A gap appeared in the gates, silently guiding El inside.
Before she’d made it halfway down the driveway, the enormous double doors set under the porch flew open, revealing a girl in the doorway: mid 20s at El’s best guess, with loose black curls pulled back from her face in a ponytail, and skin a half-shade darker than El’s. She was short but defined, the compact muscles of her calves and biceps straining behind a black silk shirt and leggings. She wore no jewellery, and carried a walkie-talkie in one hand.
“Karen Baxter,” she said, reaching out with the other to shake El’s hand. “Lady Rose’s PA.”
And her security detail, El thought.
“She’s waiting for you in the war room,” Karen added, her accent pure South London.
“The war room?” El asked, with a hesitation that wasn’t entirely feigned.
“It’s what she calls the conference room,” Karen said, but didn’t elaborate further.
She led El inside and into the hall, past the artfully-minimalist walls and the thickly-carpeted stairs leading up to the first floor and through to the room in question. There, she found an oblong table, old and solid and varnished, fringed by six incongruously-modern office chairs.
At back of the room, standing poker-straight next to an unused flip-chart, was Lady Rose.
Static, she looked very much as she had in the handful of paparazzi photos El had seen of her: lean and angular, her bright red hair styled into a Princess Diana cut, both earlobes decorated with round pearl earrings. She was more casually dressed than El had expected, in jeans and unpolished brogues, but was still, somehow, archetypically patrician.
She looked El up and down appraisingly as she entered the room.
“Dr Brandon,” she said, in exactly the clipped tone El had expected. “A pleasure to meet you.”
There was no handshake.
She gestured down at the table meaningfully. El wheeled one of the chairs a few inches free of the table and took a seat. Karen took the seat beside her, Lady Rose a chair at the head of the table.
El dug into her furred and beaded bag, now sitting unobtrusively at her feet, and pulled out the acetate wallet. She slid it slowly across the table to Lady Rose, who picked it up by its edges with a look of bemusement.
“My CV,” El said. “I thought you might want to have a look? Or we could talk through it?”
Lady Rose extracted the densely-typed sheet of paper from the wallet and looked down at the words on the page.
“You were at The Slade?” she asked as she read.
“For my PhD,” said El. “I did my masters and my undergrad at York.”
“And Frank Morrison was your supervisor?”
“That’s right.”
Lady Rose finally raised her head, and looked El directly in the eye.
“Funny,” she said. “I thought he was strictly Art Nouveau. I had no idea he had an interest in anything more contemporary than the Edwardians.”
“He’s been diversifying,” said El, maintaining eye contact.
“So it seems. I’ll have to give him a call. I haven’t seen him since the show at the V&A last year.”
If this was the first hurdle, El thought, then it was an easy one to jump.
“He’s on leave this term,” El said. “In Sumatra. He should be back in September.”
And this, as far as she knew, was true. She’d spent a long, instructive afternoon in the Wilkins Building at the Slade, chatting with postgrads and departmental admin staff and identifying, through a succession of circuitous conversations, the sabbatical calendars of some of its more senior lecturers. Morrison - Professor Francis Morrison, leading expert on the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany - gave her what she needed. A hardened old technophobe close to retirement who refused to acknowledge the presence of his departmental email address, he’d departed for Indonesia in early April with neither his wife nor a telephone in tow, making clear to anyone who asked that he’d be on leave and explicitly out of contact until late summer.
“I see,” said Lady Rose.
She glanced down again at the paper.
“You looked at Keith Haring, for your thesis?” she said.
“And Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf,” said El. “But Haring primarily. I’m interested in the relationship between street art and sexual politics, sexual citizenship. How alternative sexual identities have been mediated and constructed in US public space through appropriation of some of the stylistic motifs of pop-culture imagery.”
“Sounds like a riot,” said Karen drily.
Lady Rose raised a single, arch eyebrow. Karen drew her thumb and forefinger across her mouth in a zipping gesture.
“You’re teaching at St Martins currently?” Lady Rose asked.
“Part-time,” said El. “I also lecture at Birkbeck, and run evening classes at St. Crispin’s College in Notting HIll.”
“That must keep you busy,” Lady Rose said.
“It does,” said El. “But I’m always looking for other opportunities.”
“And you have experience, I assume, in authentication?”
“I have,” El replied pompously. “I trained at Christie’s before my PhD. And I took on a number of ad-hoc consulting projects during my research, before I started teaching.”
Karen yawned.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s the air conditioning, makes me sleepy. Carry on.”
Lady Rose put down the paper.
“Yes,” said El.
“And so you understand that their needs can sometimes be… different than the needs of an auction house?”
El looked her in the eye again.
“I do,” she said. “I was told this might be a particularly complex valuation. That there might be some… ambiguity to resolve.”
“And you’re confident you’re able to resolve it?”
“I would hope so,” said El steadily, maintaining the eye contact. “I’ve had similar issues present themselves before, with some of my previous clients. I’ve always been able to help them achieve a positive outcome. They were much smaller projects, of course. Less.. complex than yours.”
Lady Rose looked back at her, still weighing her up.
“I won’t go higher than 7 percent of the total,” she said eventually.
Here we go, thought El. She’s on the hook.
———
“She’s got this painting,” Ruby had said. “Rare. Massive great cartoon thing, looks like something off a can of 7 Up. Not my cup of tea at all. But she paid big money for it in New York last year. It was a closed auction, private seller, so it didn’t get reported on the way it would’ve if she’d bought it any other way. But big money, definitely. 1.3 million quid was what I heard.”
“Must be a hell of a painting,” El had said, taking another drag of her cigarette.
“It’s a fake,” said Ruby.
Behind the bar, the waiter had stopped cleaning the bottles. They’d fallen quiet abruptly; waited for him to begin again.
“She got taken?” said El, when he resumed his cleaning.
“Don’t know how it happened,” said Ruby. “She don’t sound the type to let it happen. But yeah, she did.1.3 million. Must have stung, eh?”
The Debt Page 4